Off again. This makes the fourth week in a row I am traveling. Back down to Jacksonville, FL on my way to Lake City, FL. For those of you keeping track, yes, I was in Florida two days ago. The necesity of this trip seems to be receding even as I travel, but such is life.

But rather than drag on about the negatives, I will talk about the great day I had yesterday. Coming back from Florida, Tiffany planned a great day on Sunday. It was probably the first day this year where being outside was comfortable. We got together with Adam, Liz, and their new puppy, Casey and went first to the New Kent Winery. We were served our tasting by Al, who did a great job. Good stories and good information on the wines. Wine was good enough that I bought a few bottles to restock my “cellar” at home.

We then drove into Richmond to Brown’s island and had a great picnic of bread, cheese, prosciotto, and apples. Sitting on the grass in the sun could not have been better. Liz, Adam, and Tiffany all practiced their gymnastics on the lawn to my amusement. We wandered around the island for a bit and made our way on the rocks in the James for fun. Casey also seemed to have a great time playing on the rocks as we walked.

Our last stop was James River cellars which was a bit if a dissapointment compared to New Kent. The servers were not as knowledgable and the wines were not as good.

We headed back home at that point with Casey mostly passing out in the back seat between Adamand I. After dropping off Adam, Liz, and the puppy we enjoyed a nice dinner of Top’s China and Dollhouse. Wish I had a longer weekend but I could not have asked for a better day between weeks of travel.

Looking forward to a quick week and a fun weekend to come.

No, this will not be an entry about parapalegic hexapods. I am on the middle set of flights this week. Monday I made way up to Green Bay, WI to help make a sales presentation to a potential client I have been involved with for a month so. This was the same client which required the trip to Iowa and Illinois two weeks ago. Now I am on the second leg down to Jacksonville, FL for two days of internal meetings including a tour of one of the first Target sites I worked on.

The presentation was an interesting one for me. I have s new respect for my friends who have done their PhD defenses. We had 4 hours to present and go through a gauntlet of questions and critiques of our proposal. While I have little experience in the sales arena, I think it went well. I should know something when we land.

Unrelated to the meetings, one of the clients recomended what turned out to be an amazing restaurant, the Republic Chophouse in Green Bay. Beyond having the Plungerhead Zin, which is a great wine, I had a great bit of Wisconsin cheeses, followed by a suprisingly good salad. I like salads, but this had an amazing basil vinagrette that must have had tons of garlic. It had a wonderful basil flavor with a sharp, raw garlic bite too it. For the main course, I had a Morroccon lamb chops that were unbelievable. Wonderfully prepared medium rare and with such depth if flavor. Cinnamon and other spices melded so well wih the meat. Delicious. An unexpected surprise in Green Bay.

So hopefully Florida is ok. Then back home Saturday. Cya!

So, I am here again writing in the air coming back from San Francisco trying to admire the view of the Rockies. While it truly is an amazing site, it doesn’t quite compensate for the travel. I set an internal goal to try to write an entry once a week, but given that I hit Friday without a positive, interesting topic coming to mind, I am left only to be slightly grumpy about travel. I hope you will grant me some leeway or just skip this entry.

Last week I did a whirlwind tour of Iowa and Illinois in 2 days. This week involved 3 days start to finish in California visiting the main bottling facility for E&J Gallo wineries. While not the idilyic setting of a winery with grapes stretching off into the distance it was cool to see a facility that bottles more wine than probably anywhere else in the country. I have never seen so much wine before.

Next week I had been scheduled to spend Wednesday night through Saturday night outside of Jacksonville, FL for an offsite meeting. But, as is often is the case, plans rarely survive first contact with the enemy or the customer. Thursday I was asked to add a pretrip Monday and Tuesday to Green Bay, WI. So, my current plan involves 6 flights next week starting at 6 am Monday morning taking me through the following airports: RIC->ORD->GRB->ORD->JAX->IAD->RIC. This over 6 days. Ugh.

So, not in the best mood right now. Hopefully I can have some quality time with Tiffany between the laundry and stuff this weekend.

There you have it. A grumpy blog post. Deal.

(But, in an attempt to mitigate the grumpy, you get a series of pictures. Aren’t I considerate?)

Trucking along at flight level 390 sitting in 2B on a United Airbus A320 right now. Ahh. What a great beginning for a blog entry. The warm nuts (just don’t say anything) and a glass of wine make this as pleasurable as air travel can be for me. Which means that it is only slightly better than the prospect of getting the same root canal my boss is getting tomorrow.

This trip started yesterday, which happenned to also be my two year anniversary with Swisslog. Up to now, I have concentrated on our largest customer on already sold projects. While I have helped on proposals before, my role has been behind the scenes. Behind the scenes no longer!

We took a prospective client to two of our sites, one in Iowa and a second in Illinois. I like to think that I availed myself well. While I am proud of the trait, my rather strict belief in openess and honesty has a tendancy to make sales guys just a little nervous. I have never never been able to embrace the loose grasp of reality necessary to truly be a salesman.

But even so, I always feel just a little dirty after sales meetings. Thankfully, I think I availed myself well and I believe that we can provide this client with a very good solution, so the sales effort was easy.

So, back home tonight after a short but tiring trip. Next week? Another sales trip to Modesto, CA. Hopefully I get some good wine out of it.

Twitter being the source of all good things nowadays (at least according to “social media experts”), I posted a question to my huge list of followers for ideas to write a blog entry about. Parsing through all the suggestion (1), I found the best idea from KT:

tisfan: @gothmog talk about how you got into photography?

Good ideas coming from KT are not unexpected as she is a far more prolific writer than I am with her blog, The Hungry Little Caterpillar and other non-web-enabled writings. So, I will embrace her question and try to do my best.

My first memory of photography was taking the occasional picture with my father’s SLR when I was very young. I don’t remember any of the pictures I took (there may not even have been film in the camera). I do have rather distinct memories of the mechanism of the camera. The manual film advance lever; the wonder of what lenses could do; the split screen focusing through the viewfinder. As a budding geek, the pure mechanics provided wonder to me that made the act of taking photographs irrelevant. My father had a box of glass lenses (why, I don’t know) that I would play with for hours exploring the various properties of convex and concave lenses. And by “properties” I do not mean solar destruction of insects; I got a fresnel lens later for that.

At some point before I was less than 10, I got a 110 film camera. I really remember nothing of the camera or any pictures I took with it, but I do remember the weird film cartridges that it used. It was a very very basic camera with manual advance and no adjustments, just point and click. I think it might have used the “single use” flash cubes, but I could be wrong.

When I was about 10 years old, I got my first 35mm camera. It was a Canon Snappy S, and it was red. I thought it was the best thing ever. I found some photos I took with it including ones that I took on a school trip to Quebec City (the waterfall to the left are the Montmorency Falls). I still have the camera; it is in my closet. It was a fully automatic camera, but it had a cool rotating lens cover that I was enamored of. I don’t remember spending much energy taking pictures at the time; I have only a few rolls of developed film.

While I did take a few photos during high school (mostly while I was at governor’s school), I stopped through college. I don’t really know why, there were just so many other things going on; I lost interest. My reintroduction to photography came in step with the digital camera revolution. But, as I look back over those images there is an inkling of my later photography topics with lots of nature shots; waterfalls, rainbows, and sunsets.

In 2001, I purchased my first digital camera, a Canon Powershot Digital Elph S110 (Canon has a way with names). I still have it and use it today especially given that I have a waterproof case for it. There are pictures in my cruise album from snorkeling and river tubing taken with it. It was, and is, a great camera. At about the same time as I bought the camera, Elizabeth and I planted lots of flowers in the front yard (photos). These flowers became subject for my budding photography.

This camera went on many a trip with me; my first cruise, Washington DC, Ocean City, Atlanta, GA, and many more, but in the end, I started getting frustrated with the limited capabilities of a fully automatic camera. I think the difficulty in taking macro photographs bothered me the most. It was not the fault of my little camera, but without having control over focus, things just got hard. I remember trying to take pictures by holding my hand where I wanted the focus point to be and then moving it to take the shot. Not a recipe for great photos.

So, on July 23rd, 2006 I ordered my lovely DSLR, a Canon EOS 20D with 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM lens (yes, I found the Amazon order confirmation email). I’m pretty sure I can credit Tiffany for getting interested in having an SLR as she talked quite a lot about her photography classes in college. I’ll also freely admit that it was a cool, geek toy. At that time, having a DSLR was not very common and I liked having a new thing. But once I started using it, I fell in love with it. I remember one of my first photo trips was wandering around campus and I saw a bunny near Swem Library. I was able to track it with the camera and using the rapid shot get several frames of it running away. That was something I could never have done with my old camera.

While there have certainly been ebbs and flows in my photography, it is an art form that I really love. Part of that love comes from the fact that I am reasonably good at it. It has allowed me to capture things which are purely artistic, but I am also able to capture and save the memory of other activities I love, whether it be cooking, travel, or my friends. It is also wonderful to have someone I love who shares my interest. Tiffany and I can reliably spend hours wandering around a park, botanical garden, or Colonial Williamsburg boring anyone who is with us as we investigate a cool shadow or reflection. So I think that is the true answer to KT’s question. I started and continue having a passion for photography because it helps me capture and save the things I love in the world.

Most of you know (or maybe not) that I have a bit of an obsession with the Supreme Court.

As the only of the three branches of government that I really have any respect for, I enjoy reading and listening to the workings and decision making process of the justices. To be clear, respect does not always mean I agree with the decisions, but even when I don’t, I fully respect the members of the court and the institution as operating in a way I like. Contrast that to the other two branches of government where I sometimes agree and sometimes disagree with the outcomes, but I rarely respect the process and motivations of the members.

Right after the State of the Union, I was poking around iTunes to see if anyone had posted the audio (to no avail), but came across a set of interviews that C-SPAN did with each of the Justices. They are available as podcasts. Each runs between 30 minutes and an hour and it is just a one-on-one interview with the justice. So far, I have listened to Justice Alito, Justice Scalia, Justice Sotomayor, Justice Kennedy, and former Justice O’Connor. Each is unique as you would expect, but I have loved them all. While I have had the pleasure of seeing Justice O’Connor, Justice Scalia, and Justice Ginsburg speak in person, it is not often that most people hear the Justices speak publicly; this is a great opportunity if you are curious.

If you are interested in more resources, I also recommend American Original: The Life and Constitution of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia which I read on our cruise last month. A few other books I have enjoyed on the court are Becoming Justice Blackmun: Harry Blackmun’s Supreme Court Journey, The Majesty of the Law: Reflections of a Supreme Court Justice by former Justice O’Connor, The Supreme Court by former Chief Justice Rehnquist, and The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court.

They (the infamous they) say that the first step in dealing with a problem is to admit that you have one. So, this entry.

“My God!” you must be thinking, “what problem is this that Jeremy feels the need to announce on his blog for all the world to see?” It must be horrible; I might be traumatized; Maybe I should get a hanky, just in case. Could it have something to do with the bursty nature of his blog posts? (hat tip, Marcia.) So, here we go, deep breath.

I have become a food snob.

::GASP::

Yes, I know, horrifying. What does this mean? How can I live with it? Can I only eat expensive food produced by pompous chefs wearing funny hats? Must I speak with a bad french accent? No. But it does mean I want my food to be, put simply, good. With very specific definitions of good. I’ve developed a set of guidelines or maybe inequalities that I try to follow:

• Local is better than trucked in from half way around the world
• Things I could (in theory) grow/produce myself is better than something that requires a chemistry set. (Not sure how Wylie Dufresne fits in here)
• Single instance restaurants are better than chains
• Passion for food matters
• Presentation matters
• Taste matters
• Outstanding service matters
• Respect your food, it is more than just what gets shoved into your pie whole

So, what brought me to this point? I blame many things. First of all, experiencing food by great chefs who also live by those standards: Chef Everett at The Blue Talon, Chef Power at The Fat Canary, Chef Kennedy at Dudley’s Farmhouse Grill in Williamsburg; Mas Tapas in Charlottesville; Craft in New York City; Marmalade in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Visiting great local restaurants everywhere: Pierce’s Pit BBQ here in town, The Shake Shack in New York City, cubbyhole pizza places in Florence. Food television and books (aka food porn) have certainly contributed; Alton Brown, Anthony Bourdain, Iron Chef, Top Chef. Tiffany certainly gets some credit too; it is invaluable to have someone who shares the same passions with you. It would be very hard to do this by myself, and would look more like an addiction than a healthy passion.

What does it mean for daily life? Chain restaurants are basically out, certainly for dinner. I try to buy “real” foods as much a possible. I savor food for foods sake when I eat; I try to taste food the same way I taste wine. When travel opportunities present themselves, I almost always start by searching for great local restaurants if the destination is fixed, or I look for a great new restaurant I want to try and use that to pick a destination. Restaurants with tasting menus get first billing. What is that I hear? Tasting menu? You don’t know what that is? Oh, sweet goodness.

Tasting menus are the chef’s equivalent of saying “mine is bigger than his.” They are multicourse meals (6-17, yes 17) where the chef and kitchen shows you, the diner, why they are the shit. Each course is rarely larger than a single bite (maybe two) that have been created to be a perfect bite of flavor, texture, presentation, smell, everything. Very often paired per course by just the right wine, it is, well, about the most decadent way to experience food. You almost always get very attentive service with explanations of each item and ingredient and why they should go perfectly with each other and the chosen wine. Often times the chef will come out and say hi and thank you. I can explain it in no other way than it is an amazing experience.

It filters into cooking at home as well. I don’t do it nearly as often I should, but when I do, I try to pay special attention to the food I buy, the food I cook, how I prepare it. I don’t have to be fancy in my food, but I try to put the same love and caring into it that I want when I eat a chef-prepared meal. And on occasion, cooking something fancy is just plain fun.

So, there you have it. I’m a food snob. I have a “problem” and I love it. It is a problem I would wish on everyone I know; you will enjoy life more. (And probably be healthier for it.)

Now if only I could could get a gig as a travel food photographer…

A tweet of mine from yesterday:

I was this close to doing a blog entry today. About how people could learn a thing or 2 about customer support in our daily interactions.

I received a small amount of grief that I didn’t write the entry so I decided this morning I would try to alleviate that guilt and give something back to the internet that I have been neglecting lately. (Beyond my short form contribution of tweets.)

The topic began in my own head as a result of a work interaction that has occurred over the previous few days. My apologies for the lack of details, but those omitted are not really relevant. I got pulled into a situation which is somewhat outside my specific expertise with regards to a contractual agreement. Sounds sexy, doesn’t it? But I do enjoy at a certain level the details of legalities and I had a few questions and concerns that I was worried about how to communicate them to a third party. I did not feel like I had the full details and when it comes down to the possibilities there might be a lawyer involved, I like having things nailed down.

Requesting the background info was my goal. I needed a copy of the original agreement so that I could make sure there were no gotchas contained inside. I shot off an email to the person who has the document (internal person) and waited for what I assumed would be the answer to a simple question.

Not so much. The answer I received was basically “Why do you need that?”

This is where we delve into customer support. I mean the term in a looser sense. While I spent many years doing “Technology Services, this is Jeremy, how can I help you” customer support, I define customer support more broadly. I will define it more broadly as:

Jeremy’s definition of customer: When anyone comes to you with a question, request, or request, they are, for the briefest of moments, your customer. Treat them accordingly.

So what is good customer support?

1. Answer the damn question! Ooops, that may have been harsh. Yes, I know as the support person you know more than the questioner. You may know, 100%, that they are asking a dumb, irrelevant question and that while they asked X, what they need is the answer to Y. It doesn’t matter! Always, always, always answer the question asked first. When you don’t, it pisses off the person asking the question.
2. Then (and this is critical too) answer the question the person should have asked. This can involve asking followup questions, offers to help them find the best solution, whatever.

Why is #1 so important? Because if you don’t, the person, your customer, will think you are either rude, didn’t listen to them, don’t care, are condescending, whatever. And all of these things are bad customer support.

So, back to my story, what should this person have done that would have simply made me happy? Simply said “Here is the document. It is huge and complicated. Why do you need it? Maybe I can answer the question for you.”

Be good at customer support in your daily life and people will think better of you and believe you are truly helpful.

While I know that this will not be the solution to everyone who is having problems between Snow Leopard and various CIFS (SMB) server implementations, I wanted to post my solution with as many keywords that google would pick it up and hopefully help a few other people.

The Symptoms: After upgrading my new Mac Mini to Snow Leopard a few weeks back, I started noticing some strange behaviors with applications that had to deal with my NAS (which is an OpenSolaris box with ZFS shares). I did not immediately make the connection to my NAS, all I saw was problems in apps. The first problem was with iTunes which stores all of its library on a NAS volume. iTunes stopped downloading Podcasts. This was not high priority to me, but two days ago, I went to purchase the 13th episode of Dollhouse, Epitaph One, and it would not download, giving an error -48.

My investigations: I checked the network connections and packets were getting out. I finally tried switching the library location back to the local hard drive and that fixed it, so I knew that there was something wrong with the storage on the NAS. However, when I tried to copy files to the NAS via the command line, everything worked fine, which stumped me for a while. I finally tried copying something from the Finder, and it also failed, this time with the error “The Finder could not complete the operation because some data in “” could not be read or written. Error code -36)”

AHA! It appears there is a problem with Cocoa apps communicating to the NAS. I looked in the system logs and started seeing the following error:

smb_maperr32: no direct map for 32 bit server error (0xc00000e5).

My Solution: Google brought up many people with this issue, but nothing that looked like a good solution. Here is where I would love to say that I had a brilliant flash of wisdom that solved the problem, but if that occurred, it was subconscious. Being stumped, I put the problem aside.

Yesterday, as I was putzing around the house, I got the idea to upgrade the OS of my OpenSolaris box from 2008.11 to 2009.06. To be clear, I in no way did this as a potential solution to my iTunes problem. I found a great set of instructions from Michael Sullivan on his Frame Dragging blog: A Smooth Upgrade - OpenSolaris 2009.06 snv_111b. Given how painful almost everything is with Solaris, I was impressed how smoothly this went (especially in light of my current procrastination of upgrading my Fedora 9 box).

After the upgrade, I thought, what the hell, let me see if this made any difference to my former problem. I dragged a file in the Finder to one of my NAS volumes, and bang! it copied. So, apparently there is some slight difference between the CIFS server in the 2008.11 version of OpenSolaris and the 2009.06 version that makes Snow Leopard happier. I don’t think the problem was with OpenSolaris, my feeling is that Snow Leopard just isn’t handling an odd situation right, the new version of OpenSolaris just happens to work more like Snow Leopard likes.

So, I hope this helps someone other than me.

Today class, we will learn about states! California to be exact. And, well, learn might be too strong a word to describe the benefits from reading this report I wrote. My guess is that I wrote this in 1985 or so, which would have made me 10 years old at the time, so 5th grade. That brings to mind one of those things we take for granted with computers today, they know what time it is. I unfortunately have to guess with these items as computers didn’t have clocks. Even later, they did, but no batteries; remember booting up a DOS box and having to enter the time on startup? Glad that is behind us.

So, here you go, my thoughts on California.

The name of the state I have picked is California. The capitol is Sacromento in the middle of the California Valley. California became a state on September 9, 1850. Its population has grown to 25,622,000 in 1984.

In California the climate varies FROM 104-88F in July. In January it is from 64-40F.

California has some mountains which is the Sierra Nevada range. The valleys are the California Valley and Death Valley .

California is located in the western part of the U.S.A.. The main rivers are the San Joaquin and the Sacramento R. which emty into the San Francisco Bay. The largest cities are Sacramento which is in the California Valley and San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles and San Jose which are by the waterfront.

In 1848 John A. Sutter was building a mill and discovered gold. He didn´t want anyone to know, but news finally got out and started the gold rush.

In California there are many tourist attractions. One of the most popular is Disneyland. One of the largest zoos is the San Diego Zoo. People drive on the RedWood Highway to see the large Redwood Trees. In Death Valley there is a large castle called Scotty´s Castle.

I picked this state because it is not only one of the largest states but one of the warmest.

Ironically, while I wrote that report nearly 25 years ago, I did not get to California in person until 2007 (San Francisco, Macworld 2007, EFF 16th). I’m afraid my experience on that trip did not overlap very much with this report. Maybe next time, although I doubt it, since I really just want to go back and visit some of the wineries.